Thirty-One Letters

Thirty-Two

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die—Thomas Campbell

On the last Sunday of August, the Good Mourning Group met for their final session of the summer.

Nothing had changed much about that group. Nine people still sat in a circle on blue plastic chairs in the basement of the Wrightsville Beach Baptist Church. The room was still small and cold, smelling of mold and grief. Hadley still sat in her regular spot, rolling her eyes at Phil and pulling faces with the others whenever he wasn't looking.

From the outside, all was the same in the group.

Inside, Hadley was...different.

Not the girl she had been when she'd started coming to these meetings. Wholly separate from the person who had been sitting in that room months earlier at the beginning of summer. She listened to Phil drone on but it was like she'd crossed a threshold into a different room. Watching through a window.

It wasn't that Hadley had stopped grieving for Tanner but...something had changed. That grief, that pain and emptiness, no longer swallowed her up. She found that she could breathe now without feeling as if her lungs were about to collapse. A part of her would always be missing. Never again would she be completely whole. But the part of her that made up that empty void had shrunk considerably. A hole the size of a watermelon was now no bigger than a baseball.

Phil turned to her.

"Hadley, how are you this week?"

A week since Ty had left. Four days until the six month anniversary of Tanner's death arrived.

Maybe she should have been a wreck. Hadley was sure that the anniversary would be hard. Crushingly hard. But if the last half-year had taught her anything, it was that she was strong enough not to break from the weight. Hadley had always been a fighter. Tanner, with his letters and the legacy he'd left behind, had made her a survivor. Someone who could figure out how to pick up the pieces of a broken soul and stitch them back together.

The twenty-ninth letter had done that for her.

Hadley had brought it to this meeting. Had shoved it into her pocket where it had sat until now. She pulled it out, fingers brushing the ridges of the crinkled and creased envelope. All of the eyes in the room were on her. On that letter.

"My brother wrote me letters before he died," she began, her own eyes on the envelope in her hands. "Each one had something different that he wanted me to do. Challenges to help me figure out how to live in a world that he didn't exist in. At the start, I didn't really expect that they'd be any help. I read the letters because seeing his handwriting made me feel like he was there with me. I completed each of the challenges he wanted me to do. Usually he would give me an explanation about why he was picking a certain task but I opened this letter last night and he only wrote two words on the page."

They were all staring. Silent. Utterly engrossed in what she was about to say.

"Forgive yourself," Hadley told them. "Forgive yourself."

And fell quiet to let the words sink in.

Hadley took a breath. "I think he knew that I would blame myself for him dying. That I would spend the rest of my life angry because I thought that I could have stopped him somehow even though he made the choice to take his own life. I hadn't realized that I was punishing myself until he gave me the permission to stop doing it in this letter.

"Maybe there was something I could have done to save his life," Hadley said.  "Maybe there was a sign that I missed. Or maybe nothing I could have done would have made any difference at all. In any case, it doesn't matter now and forcing myself to relive every single conversation we ever had looking for one of those signs isn't going to bring him back.